A Crying Shame: Europe's 'Flight Shaming' Movement: Shame On You For Flying On A Plane

American Thinker ^ | 11/01/2019 | By Chris J. Krisinger

[SeekAndFind]

If one invention in mankind's history has connected people and places, helped raise the standard of living for billions of people, and allowed anyone to travel the world freely, it is the modern jet airliner. Yet environmental activists are now sprouting another offshoot of the "global warming" movement to recklessly contract and diminish this advancement in human ingenuity because they fret over aircraft as one of the most "carbon-intensive" forms of travel.

Your new word for the day is "flygskam" (pronounced: "fleeg-skam"). It is a Swedish word introduced by the nascent — still mostly European — environmental movement to "flight-shame" travelers into refraining from taking flights to lower carbon emissions.

Among the most notable to embrace the flygskam idea so far is the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. It was Thunberg who traveled to New York this summer to address a U.N. climate summit via her 15-day trans-Atlantic sailboat passage instead of hopping on an airplane to make the likely less than 15-hour door-to-door trip. The idea was originally backed by Olympic athlete Bjorn Ferry and gained momentum after Thunberg's mother, opera singer Malena Ernman, publicly announced she would stop flying, with other Swedish celebrities following suit.

Also in Europe, where the movement is still trying to get off the ground, there is even related activism, complete with its own word "tagskryt" (roughly translating to "train bragging"), where one boasts about taking trains instead of planes. (Europeans don't often travel the 2,500 air miles from New York to L.A., or the even farther 2,700-plus miles from Seattle to Miami — and stay within the same country. Stockholm-to-Helsinki or London-to-Paris-to-Berlin just isn't the same.)

Understandably, the flygskam movement has hit rough air trying to catch on in the United States despite increasing notoriety in Europe.

[SeekAndFind]

Well, it doesn't seem to be working....

In fact, air travel here rose 3.9% in the first five months of 2019 (while decreasing by a comparable percentage in Sweden) and global forecasts for air travel continue to rise according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA).  

That said, while few Americans have actually heard of the European "flight shame" movement, a North American strain is already emerging.  One can already draw similarities and parallels to flygskam from American politicians — Democrats in particular — with their proposals for some sort of "Green New Deal" having more urgent and radical iterations that could drastically alter today's expectations and ability to fly by air.

[A Formerly Proud Canadian]

Hopefully, Greta Thunberg and her commie family will be ‘flight shamed’ for flying all over North America, politicizing oil usage. That family is SOOO HYPOCRITICAL.

[simpson96]

Sounds like something out of Atlas Shrugged.

[minnesota_bound]

See the number of planes here:
https://www.flightradar24.com/51,-2/6

Just twitter talk. No one normal is listening to these Luddites.

[cuban leaf]

For a person to be able to shame you, you have to respect their opinion.

[The Toll]

Europe’s economy is tourist based. Well, it was.

[SeekAndFind]

[Kozak]

Good for them. The less they fly, the cheaper it gets for me to fly.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I personally support air travel because it generates so many tons of CO2 -— the Healthy Planet Miracle!

[ronniesgal]

i don’t like to fly, but may have to now.

[DeFault User]

Last time I checked, it was still a lot cheaper to fly than choo-choo. I bet cheap wins.

[Oldexpat]

All those socialists can just spend the entire winter in the cold instead of a warm tropical beach. And pay out the nose for heat.

[Spirochete]

Hopefully, Greta Thunberg and her commie family will be ‘flight shamed’ for flying all over North America, politicizing oil usage. That family is SOOO HYPOCRITICAL.

Foreigners participating in American civil discourse. It's wrong and there has to be a way to legally stop it.

[Don Corleone]

Europe? That’s somewhere east of here isn’t it?

[rlmorel]

I am an aviation nut, and I got this application almost a month ago on the recommendation of a friend, and I looked at it for 15 seconds and paid the money to get a year plan.

It is that good.

Love it. Just love it!

[John O]

So the stinky liberals are going to stop flying???

Excellent news!!!

[Cobra64]

Yup. Plants 💌 CO2.

[Reeses]

Last time I checked, it was still a lot cheaper to fly than choo-choo. I bet cheap wins.

Money is data, which is why most money is stored and processed by computers these days. The price of something tells us roughly the amount of energy that was consumed in making it, as well as how much pollution was generated. It is easy to determine if product A pollutes more than B. Half an airline ticket is taxes and fees, so there's obviously a whole lot of CO2 emissions taking place indirectly that have nothing to do with flying. A train ticket only covers 10% to 25% of the total cost, with taxes covering the rest. Without train subsidies nobody would ride them as they would be priced out of the market. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine which is the biggest polluter. It's not even close.

[Billthedrill]

Not good enough, Comrades! We must blockade airports and physically assault passengers in the name of non-violence!

[willyd]

Force equals mass times acceleration... it takes the same amount of energy to move you from Frankfurt to Belgium regardless of how you travel.